to a congregation of Gypsies he felt highly flattered by the patient attention of his hearers, till he happened to notice that they all had their eyes fixed in a diabolical squint.  Something of the same kind would, we fear, be the effect on a large number of persons of well-meant expositions of the English civil-service reform and its admirable results.  Nor will any appeals to the moral sense excite an indignation at the workings of our present system sufficiently deep and general to demand its overthrow.  Civil-service reform had a far easier task in England than it has here, and forces at its back which are here actively or inertly opposed to it.  There the system of patronage was intimately connected with oligarchical rule; official positions were not so much monopolized by a victorious party as by a privileged class; the government of the day had little interest in maintaining the system, the bulk of the nation had a direct interest in upsetting it, and its downfall was a natural result of the growth of popular power and the decline of aristocracy.  Our system, however similar in its character and effects, had no such origin; it does not belong to some peculiar institution which we are seeking to get rid of:  on the contrary, it has its roots in certain conceptions of the nature of government and popular freedom—­of the relations between a people and those who administer its affairs—­which are all but universally current among us.

It is this last point which is clearly and forcibly presented in the article of our contributor, and which it will behoove the Reformers not to overlook.  Nothing is more characteristic of the American mind, in reference to political ideas, than its strong conservatism.  This fact, which has often puzzled foreign observers accustomed to connect democracy with innovating tendencies and violent fluctuations, is yet easily explained.  Though ours is a new country, its system of government is really older than that of almost any other civilized country.  In the century during which it has existed intact and without any material modification the institutions of most other nations have undergone a complete change, in some cases of form and structure, in others of theory and essence.  Even England, which boasts of the stability of its government and its immunity from the storms that have overturned so many thrones and disorganized so many states, has experienced a fundamental, though gradual and peaceable, revolution.  There, as elsewhere, the centre of power has changed, the chain of tradition has been broken, and new conceptions of the functions of government and its relations to the governed have taken the place of the old ones.  But in America nothing of this kind has occurred:  the “old order” has not passed away, nor have its foundations undergone the least change; the municipal and colonial institutions under which we first exercised the right of self-government, and the Constitution which gave us our national baptism,